Sim cards and carriers, discussion

[calinb]

Wow, thanks to everyone for all of the amazing tips! We have had the new phones for about two weeks. Here is our experience so far:

Initially had old Verizon flip phones. Service started to fall apart and we discovered the dismantling of the 3G service. Verizon is it for us in Northern, rural US.  We ordered cards for Puretalk.

With Puretalk, we finally got it to work on Arch and Mobian fairly consistently. Arch was doing some dropping of service, had to turn off auto rotate or it would drop calls. Text worked for the most part, but some would get missed if phone was off or sleeping, and occasionally, text would get crossed and show up under the wrong contact.  The biggest problem was that our area is only really covered by Verizon consistently, so we could not get calls at our house, which is kind of useless. Too get it to work, we just had to set the APN to RESELLER. It had to be in 4G only to get and make calls.

For USMobile, I currently have it running on Mobian and have sent and received text, made and received phone calls. I had to register the black SIM with an old phone and then switch it to the Pinephone, as suggested by others. So far, so good. The service is excellent and I will try It out over the next day or two before porting my old number. This may be the solution for us in rural (Midwest) america. I could send text on US Mobile recommended APN of pwg, but had to switch to vzwinternet APN to get and receive calls.

Thanks so much for all of the amazing help!!

Here in rural N. Central Idaho, Verizon and/or Inland Cellular are a must. (Inland is not an MVNO and has its own towers and roaming agreements with Verizon.) Unfortunately, Inland and Verizon are CDMA networks and the Pinephone is a GSM phone that does not support CDMA.

Making things worse, the WCDMA specs for the Pinephone, as listed, probably mislead many newbies, as I myself experienced. To understand the plethora of cellular technologies requires decoding a minefield of information. Any online website FAQ on the subject that says "it's simple" so just read THIS explanation and you'll be enlightened and claims to provide an accurate and comprehensive tutorial is lying!

In my research of the history of WCDMA, I learned that it is actually a GSM "thing" that originally enabled GSM networks to achieve "Gen4" performance. It is useless for connecting a Pinephone to a "CDMA cellular provider" so, for the Pinephone to connect to a CDMA network, the Pinephone user must have a useable LTE signal available from that cellular provider so VoLTE can be used for voice (possibly, if not blocked by black/white lists).

Verizon supports LTE of course and also VoLTE so its networks and MVNOs have reportedly functioned with the Pinephone. Sadly for N. Central Idaho, Inland does not yet have VoLTE support. Though Inland has purchased infrastructure that should allow them to bring up LTE (my impression is mostly software systems are still required), Inland does not respond to my written inquiries about planned VoLTE availability dates. Without VoLTE, my Pinephone does not function for voice or SMS anywhere in the vicinity of my home, but Inland 4G LTE data works.

rocket2nfinity and I have searched for VoIP / SIP solutions for the Pinephone that could be used as an alternative to VoLTE on LTE data networks but, so far, nothing appears to be even close to usable on the Pinephone.

The AT&T GSM network works with my Pinephone in larger towns and cities (within an hour drive) and AT&T is expanding its rural 4G LTE where I live, but the AT&T LTE bands recently rolled-out for rural use (I think B17 is primary in the roll-out) are unsupported by Pinephone too.